PIB Delhi – To strengthen the cyber security ecosystem in the country, the National e-Governance Division under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) is conducting a six-day deep dive training program for Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) and frontline IT officials from various Ministries & Departments, Government & Semi-Government organisations from Central and State Governments, PSUs, banks, among others. The training program is a part of a series of workshops organised by the National e-Governance Division at MeitY under the Cyber Surakshit Bharat initiative.
It will help the CISOs and other participants to equip themselves with better understanding of the emerging cyber threat landscape, understand best practices in cyber security so that they are able to translate the benefits of a secure cyber space to individual organisations and citizens at large. At the inaugural session of the deep dive training program, Ms. Tulika Pandey, Director, Cyber Security Division, MeitY urged all the participants to share their experiences and feedback in order to learn with each others’ experience and further strengthen the existing security systems. She further emphasized that the “role of a CISO is to keep an agile mind” and being able to take care of any procedures to remove any malaise if it occurs. “Every member of the organization should be digitally alert and should be able to detect any abnormalities,” she said.
Rakesh Maheshwari, Group Coordinator, Cyber Laws Division, MeitY briefed the participants on the growing cyber security threats in the country and the importance of data privacy. “With Data Protection Bill which is in Parliament and it might soon become an act, security of personal data of any individual will become liability for any organization which is storing the data”, he said. He talked about the recent hack of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting’s Twitter account and said that “when things go wrong, we should know who is going to take what action”. “Our websites and apps should be secure, and our terms of usage should be finalized in such a way that we should know what data is being collected”. He said that when most of the work is being outsourced to third party organizations, the outsourcing should be done in such a way that the control is always with us”.
Satya Narayan Meena Director CB, NeGD outlined the importance of the deep dive training program for Chief Information Security Officers at a time when everything is becoming digital. “When we were locked down in the pandemic, digitization kept us all going. Cyber security has become an important part of our life and workplace and hence, our objective is to train our CISOs through this programme and share best practices of cyber security,” he said. To empower the CISOs with the emerging challenges of cyber security and train them to meet the challenges, MeitY had initiated the Cyber Surakshit Programme in January 2018 with active support of industry consortium. The objective of the programme is to train 1200 CISOs and frontline IT officials from Central and State Government, PSUs, Banks and government organizations.
From June 2018 till December 2021, 25 batches of training have already been conducted and around 1018 CISOs and other front line IT officials from Central and State Governments, PSUs, Banks and Government organizations have been trained. The program is being conducted from January 17 – 22, 2022 and will cover topics such as Governance Risk & Compliance and Data Privacy, Network Security, End Point Security, Application & Data Security, Cloud Security, Mobile Security, Cryptography, Cyber Security related provisions in IT Act, Security audit, guidelines for preparing CCMP and operation and monitoring of Security Operation Centre (SoC) etc.
